Global Strategy Advisor & Former Dean, Rotman School
STRATEGY EXPERT
Core Definition
What Is Strategy?
"Strategy is an integrated set of choices that compels desired customer action. We control many things—factories, R&D, advertising, people. What we don't control is what customers do with their money. That's the job of strategy."
It's about the whole system of choices, not individual decisions
Every choice must reinforce the others—that's the integration
The outcome: customers voluntarily choose to give us their money
Framework
The Strategy Choice Cascade: 5 Questions
5
integrated questions you must answer
Winning Aspiration: What are we trying to accomplish? Why this market?
Where to Play: Which customers? Which products? Which channels? What value chain?
How to Win: Be differentiated OR low cost—never both
Capabilities: What must we build that competitors don't have?
Management Systems: What systems enable these capabilities?
Why these five?These questions emerged from 8 years of deep work (1987–1995) trying to commercialize Porter's frameworks. Clients wanted to know: how do you actually build differentiation or cost leadership?
The Cascade Deep Dive
Questions 2–5: Where, How, Capabilities, Systems
"Where to Play" includes:
• Who are the customers?
• Which products / components?
• What distribution channels?
• Where in the value chain?
"How to Win" is binary:
• Differentiation (better customer value)
• Low cost (lower price for same value)
• NO "stuck in the middle"
"Capabilities" are the moat:
• What must you do better than competitors?
• What can't be easily replicated?
Four Seasons Example
Where: Luxury hotel management (not real estate, not construction, not ownership—just management). Why? To be world-class at operations. Capabilities: obsessive guest experience standards no one matches.
Westlaw Example
Digital legal research that saves lawyers time = lower their costs. Moat: all the case law indexed and searchable. Creates defensible advantage for lawyers who can't practice without it.
Playbook
How to Avoid Strategy Failure
Don't enter a market just because it's "big"—that's not a reason
Ground your aspiration in customer pain, not your growth ambitions
Pick your mode: be radically differentiated OR radically cheaper—half-measures fail
Build the capabilities gap first, then scale
Test: can your capabilities be protected? (Warren Buffett's "moat")
Roger's warning on moatsEven genius investors get moats wrong (Warren Buffett: Salomon Brothers, USAir). You should be pleased with your moat-spotting if you're 80% right. Moats erode. That's normal.
Contrarian
What Business Schools Get Wrong
✗Resource-Based View of the Firm is scienceINSTEAD →✓ It's an academic turf war against Porter. RBVF doesn't tell you what resources to build. It's silent on strategy.
✗Top people should teach strategyINSTEAD →✓ At top schools, teaching practical strategy is "illegal"—you must swear allegiance to RBVF or you don't get hired.
✗Strategy is execution. Separate them.INSTEAD →✓ Strategy IS a choice cascade. Execution is implementing those choices. They're inseparable. A brand manager 4 levels down makes strategy daily.
✗Great strategists are born, not madeINSTEAD →✓ I've never met a "natural" strategist. Every great strategist practices relentlessly. It's learnable.